With frontline politics now impossible for the former energy secretary, Huhne, 58, has several options open to him.

The tried and trusted immediate route for other high-profile politicians who have found themselves in a similar, unenviable position, is to court publishers.

Both Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative minister jailed in 1999 for perjury, and Lord Archer, the former Tory party chairman jailed in 2001, also for perjury, churned out memoirs on the back of their experience.

Aitken, said to have been in contact with Huhne during the latter's brief incarceration, has reportedly said the former Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh, has expressed an interest in the rehabilitation, re-employment and aftercare of prisoners.

Chris Graying, the justice secretary, wants former prisoners to mentor offenders after their release, a task Huhne and Pryce would be eminently suited to.

However, Huhne, who has been described as a multimillionaire with a large property portfolio, still has to pay the bills. It is understood some of the properties have been sold. Pryce lives in the former family home, a £2.5m Clapham townhouse, while Huhne is sharing a £1.2m flat in Clerkenwell, north London, with Carina Trimingham, 46, the PR adviser for whom he left Pryce in 2010.

He was appointed as a consultant to green energy company Nationwide Energy Services shortly before he pleaded guilty on the day of his trial in February to perverting the course of justice. A fast-growing company, which helps people obtain government grants to make their homes more environmentally friendly, Huhne would be a useful asset, drawing on his vast experience of green energy policy.

He also revealed that he could draw consolation from the fact he had enjoyed two careers before entering politics. "I know I can do other things because I have done them. It gives me a certain ability to have the confidence that, with the trust and help of others, I can do something positive at the end of this process," he said in his Guardian interview.

He is also still fighting an order for prosecution court costs of £100,000 against him, and has, to date, offered to pay £25,000. A judge is to rule on that in the near future.

Meanwhile Pryce, a prominent economist who resigned her highly paid job as senior managing director at FTI Consulting upon her conviction for perverting the course of justice, is determined to resume her career in the field.

There is also speculation she is working on a tell-all memoir about the break-up of her marriage and the subsequent fallout including the court case.

Sources said that while in East Sutton Park open prison, she had been keen to gather information about the economics of the criminal justice system, and the position of women in prison.

The former joint head of the government economic service, and first female chief economist at the Department of Trade and Industry, later the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is no stranger to the media, having been a high-profile economic pundit who appeared regularly on Newsnight and other current affairs programmes.

It has emerged that her most recent work, Greekonomics, about the country's struggle with debt and the euro crisis, had been considered for the prestigious Orwell prize but dropped because of her conviction.